It seemed like they stood there forever in the darkness of the second floor, the tiny candle flickering at Gage’s back, before she lowered her pry bar. She thrust it over her shoulder, between her back and bag.
“I’ll go with you Gage, for Olive—and because I was stupid enough to make a promise. Maybe this will teach you how to keep one.
Chapter Thirteen
The Before
“I’m talking to you, weirdo!”
Eve jerked back from her locker and looked up at the person standing over her. She hadn’t noticed them before. Her mind was busy drowning in the never-ending pools of Gage’s beautiful eyes and the way he had smiled at her in first period.
“What?” She stood with her books and met the dark brown gaze of the one and only Sally McCallister. Her long brown hair was curled in perfect ringlets again, framing her tan face.
“I’ve heard about your little grade-school crush on Gage.”
Eve sucked in a breath and stepped back. How does she know? I haven’t even told a soul. “What I—”
“It’s obvious. Allison told me all about how you drool over him and force him to be your partner in AP Physics.” Sally brushed a hand through her hair, sweeping her side bangs out of her face. The move was so simple, but Eve envied it. She’d wanted bangs just like those so she would fit in with the latest trend, but no. Her mom had sent her to her room telling her to get on her knees and pray and ask for forgiveness for wanting to be a sinner.
How does a haircut make me a sinner? She still didn’t have an answer for that.
“I—”
“Hey Sal, what’s up?” The voice that came from behind her, froze her body. It was Gage’s voice. So beautiful and lilting.
“Just telling this trailer trash to keep her paws off my man.”
Off her man? The words bounced around in Eve’s head like a bottle rocket in a tiny room.
“Telling who?” He put his arm around Sally. His friend Noah, came to stand beside him. “Oh.”
She didn’t look in Gage’s eyes, nor did she respond to Sally’s rude comment. Instead she stared down at her white tennis shoes that were barely visible beneath her denim skirt.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about, honey bun.”
Honey bun? The words burned a vicious hole in Eve’s heart. She hadn’t known that they were a couple, though she wasn’t entirely sure how she had missed it. Sally had always had an older boyfriend who wasn’t from Sunder. Eve recalled that she’d overheard some of the girls saying they had broken up a few weeks ago, but hadn’t thought much of it. I should have known.
Without looking at either of them, Eve turned around and walked away, fighting back the tears that threatened to burst from her eyes. She headed in the wrong direction. Her class was only two doors down from her locker, but she didn’t want to have to walk by them and risk having to see the two of them arm in arm, or worse, laughing at her. I’ll just take the long way to class.
Eve had just made the right at the end of the hallway that would lead her to the only other hallway in Sunder high school when she heard quick footsteps behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, not wanting to get run over by whoever it was. She was shocked to see Gage—alone. She refused to notice how handsome he was in his T-shirt, jeans that fit just right, and cowboy boots.
“Eve!” She stopped as he approached her. What is he doing? He’d never done anything like this before. Who cares? Just walk away, Eve. He let that girl call you trailer trash and comforted her! Her rioting thoughts didn’t change anything. She stood there and waited for him.
He looked around when he stopped a few feet away from her. She mirrored him, wondering what he was looking for. They were near one of the two sets of bathrooms for students. The baby blue walls were covered with red and white homecoming posters. The bell was less than a minute away from ringing and there was no one around.
“Are you going to the homecoming game tonight?”
“What?”
Gage smiled down at her. “The football game. Are you going?”
Eve shook her head. Her parents never allowed things like that. Friday night was the one night they didn’t pray the full two hours before bed-time. It was their “day of rest” as her dad called it. So instead they would have a short bible study after dinner and then be in bed by seven. Lame. So lame.
“Why not?” His forehead puckered ever so slightly, as if he was disappointed.
“I’m just…not.” She couldn’t explain why she wasn’t going. The whole school already thought she was a big enough freak as it was. The truth would only make it worse.
“Oh, well, uh…” He looked away from her and ran a hand over his head. “I wanted you to come... and watch me play.”
“What?” The word escaped her throat on an exhale of air and her heart rate kicked up. Oh my gosh! Gage just asked me to go to homecoming with him!
“Yeah.” His cheeks reddened though it wasn’t too obvious with his dark skin, Eve could still see the subtle color change.
“But you and…” She gestured back to the way he came and disappointment settled in her gut. This was some sort of joke, it had to be. A prank and everyone, with Sally at the front, were about to jump out and laugh at her.
“It’s not what you think with her.”
Eve opened her mouth with the intent of asking what that even meant, but he cut her off. “I’ve got Mrs. Daniel right now and I gotta go, but please say you will be there and at the dance afterward.”
The dance? Oh my gosh!
As if her body was a puppet she had no control over, her head bobbed up and down in agreement. She even heard herself say, “I’ll be there.” And then he was gone, flashing her his most handsome smile before high-tailing it around the corner.
Chapter Fourteen
“You got your things?”
Eve didn’t bother looking over her shoulder at Gage, who she knew was emerging from the house. She didn’t answer him either. He knew she had everything. There was never a moment that she wasn’t ready or prepared.
Instead, she kept her eyes trained on the scenery in front of her. The land was beautiful with the rising sun. Trees surrounded the large tank in the front and the driveway. Earlier she had made her way to the backside of the wrap-around porch. There was no floral barrier between the house and hundreds of open acres behind the house. The sprawling land was the color of wheat that seemed to glow like pure gold in the growing sunlight.
The beauty of the vast plantation home and all of its land wasn’t lost on Eve. The sadness that tugged at her gut wouldn’t leave her. She’d wanted to come to the home all of her life. To revel in its beauty and be a part of the history of the only town she’d ever lived in. She was overwhelmed by the fact that she’d just spent the night there and was watching the sunrise from the old porch. And now she would be leaving. A part of her knew instinctively that she would never come back.
She ended up sitting on the front porch with her back against the white wood near the door, disliking the overwhelming emotions that the golden field at the back of the house triggered. She’d instead, focused on a jenk approaching the porch. It looked to be a man, though she wasn’t one hundred percent sure. It could have been a flat chested woman with a shaggy haircut.
Eve had been watching the jenk for a good twenty minutes, though she’d been outside for more than thirty waiting for Gage. Shockingly enough she had been spared a lecture on running for her life and leaving his ass behind when she’d informed him she was going outside. He’d only nodded his head, though she couldn’t read his expression in the little to no light inside the house.
She was tempted to leave. So tempted. But she didn’t. She had promised him and it irked her that she even cared about that. Promises didn’t mean anything in the before and they sure as hell didn’t mean anything now, but a part of her wanted to show him that she wasn’t like him—a person who just disregarded their promises.
“Just gonna let that thing come up on the porc
h and have you for breakfast?” The jenk had reached the stairs. Eve watched with amusement as it stumbled. Its gray, bare feet shuffling and smacking against the wood. It never took its eyes off of Eve. The cloudy, bottomless pits didn’t care that it had probably just broken all of its toes. Sometimes she envied their ability to feel no pain.
She stood when Gage nocked an arrow next to her.
“No.” She put her hand on his arm, his flesh warm beneath her fingertips.
“What?” She didn’t miss the annoyance in his tone.
“Move out of the way.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.” She gave him a little shove that didn’t budge his thick masculine form in the slightest. He stepped away on his own accord and lowered his bow.
“Seriously?”
She ignored him and stood her ground, watching the jenk who had finally made it up the steps. Upon closer inspection, Eve could tell he was definitely a man, even his dry, gray skin couldn’t cover up the light-colored growth of hair on his face. As far as Eve knew, the jenks’ hair didn’t continue to grow after their death, so this one died needing a shave.
She back-pedaled a few steps when he got close.
“What the fuck, Eve?” She heard Gage nock another arrow. The jenk turned his head at the sound of Gage’s complaint and changed its course, moving toward him instead.
“Hey, mister mister, come on now. You don’t want him for your breakfast. Assholes don’t taste that good. I promise. I know you want some of this.” She let her voice take on a higher note as if she was talking to a baby or a dog. She shook her arm in front of her face to lure him away from Gage.
It worked. He turned back in her direction and reached forward trying to grab her. She dodged out of the way and opened one of the two front doors and backed through it with the jenk following her in. She let the door slam behind them. She danced out of his reach and ran for the door again. Once outside, she slammed it closed with a thunk that seemed to rattle the whole house.
“What was that for?” The irritation in Gage’s voice was palpable.
“I locked him inside.”
“Okay, why?”
“I figured he would keep future looters from stealing your precious inheritance.”
Gage stared at Eve as she marched off the porch. Is she serious? He didn’t ask the question out loud because he knew she was. Anger coursed through him again, for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last forty-eight hours.
“So, that’s it, huh?” He followed her. “You’re just going to storm off and act like you’re some sort of saint? That I’m the one who is at fault?”
Eve stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. “I’m not a saint.”
“You sure are acting like one. You don’t even have a real reason to be pissed at me.” She started walking again when he reached her. Her steps were jerky and quick. “You know it too.”
“Are you still talking?”
“You know that you’re the one at fault, don’t you? It’s either that, or you really do think you’re a damned saint.” A feeling of satisfaction washed over him. Yelling at her, feeling angry at her, washed out all of the other emotions thrumming through his body.
Eve stopped walking and turned to him. “I’m not a fucking saint, Gage. I don’t think I am and I never will. I—Have you been crying?” The question took him back. He’d hope that it wouldn’t be noticeable. Men weren’t supposed to cry, but hell if it didn’t hurt saying goodbye to Jacksondale. It was as much a part of him as the skin on his back.
The hard glint in her blue-green eyes softened and suddenly he couldn’t help but feel like a petulant child, blaming someone else for something because he didn’t get what he wanted. And what Gage wanted was his life back—his family, Jacksondale, all of it…and Eve too. He tried hard not to, but he did. He didn’t usually dwell on the past because he knew he couldn’t change it, but seeing the place again for the first time in so long had triggered emotions he didn’t like.
He looked away from her. “Fuck.” He ran a hand over his head. “Just forget it.” He started walking and she kept pace with him, though she didn’t say anything. They walked in a pregnant silence for some time. He didn’t look at her. She’d seen his weakness and he didn’t like it. Weaknesses were dangerous.
They reached the old gravel road they’d traveled on yesterday and together they took a right. A left would have sent them back to town, going right signified that they would be taking the old Tim Pistol road that intersected with this one a few miles away. The only other way to get into Fenton aside from the interstate.
“I understand, you know,” she said after they’d been walking for a while.
“Understand what?”
“How you feel about Jacksondale. You may not think that I do, because I lived in a ‘squalid little trailer.’”
He’d forgotten that he’d said that. “Eve—”
“Let me finish.” Their shoes made crunching noises across the gravel as they walked. “That trailer was the only home I ever had. It wasn’t pretty or fabulous. It didn’t have thousands of diamonds hanging from the ceiling…but it was still my home. And I burned it to the ground with my parents inside.”
Gage jerked his head, and looked at her. He knew she’d burned it down, had told him as much, but she hadn’t shared the tidbit about her parents being inside.
“It was the only home I ever had. The only family I knew, besides my sister and I burned it all. I didn’t look back either, not once did I look back to see the flames because I knew it would break me. I hated my parents for the way they treated me, but I still loved them. It seems like love and hate are double-sided coin. You can’t have one without the other.”
How right she was about that. He felt like an asshole for what he’d said about her house, but he didn’t say he was sorry. The words were there on the tip of his tongue and that’s where they stayed. He just kept walking, staring out at the long gravel road ahead of them. There were no houses. A thick wooded area flanked the side to their left, while the land on the right was open, rolling fields. Farmland.
“You know, they thought that Jesus had come.” A bubble of laughter escaped her lips after she spoke that had Gage glancing sideways at her. “That’s why they called it the Reckoning. They said that Jesus had come to settle his accounts with the people of earth, that he was coming to take them to heaven.” She spoke like it was a joke.
“You don’t think that’s what this is?” Even though Gage had lived in the Bible Belt all his life, his family had never been a spiritual one and in all honesty, he didn’t know what he believed.
She gave him a droll stare. “God didn’t come. Jesus didn’t sit upon the throne in Jerusalem. At least, if he did, then I never heard about it. The best part about all of it, was that they blamed me for the entire six months that we were stuck in trailer after things went to crap. Said it was all my fault, that Jesus hadn’t come and taken them from the hell on earth. They even blamed Olive in the end. Their golden child.”
“They really treated her different?” He hadn’t heard her speak an ill word of her sister ever.
“Yes, while I was named after the original sin and she was named after the olive branch that the white dove brought to Noah. A sign of possibility, of hope, and love.”
Gage successfully felt like an asshole. His family hadn’t been perfect, but he’d known, even in the before, that her family had problems that he couldn’t comprehend. Things were worse than even he thought. “That’s pretty damn unfair.”
She shrugged next to him. “It’s life. And life isn’t fair. The best part about all of it, is that she hates me.”
“Olive hates you?”
“Yep. Always has, even after the Crave set in. She hated me more with every passing day.” The last words were said so quietly that Gage barely heard them.
“But, why?”
She shrugged again, her wavy blond hair brushed against the top of her shoulder. “She believed my pare
nts. They loved her and treated her differently. Why wouldn’t she believe them?”
“That can’t be all it is.”
Eve didn’t look at him, nor did she respond. There was more to the story, he could tell.
“Why do you even want to find her in the first place?” He nearly smacked himself for saying the words out loud. Good job buddy. Yeah, talk her out of wanting to find her sister. Then you’ll really have no leverage to keep her with you.
“Blood is thicker than water, right Gage?” The edge in her voice was his indication that she was cutting him off, hiding behind her anger again.
She’d led such a sad life before and maybe that was why he had been drawn to her that first day of his senior year. She needed someone and part of him responded back then, wanting to be her knight in shining armor. He never would have admitted it out loud. Dudes don’t think about that kind of thing and they sure as hell didn’t share it with their friends.
A glass-shattering scream rent the air.
Gage jerked his crossbow from his back and nocked an arrow, spinning to his left. In his peripheral vision he could see that Eve had done the same with her pry bar.
“What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, didn’t sound like a gurgh, though.”
“No shit, Gage.”
He stared at the tree line where the sound had come from, raking his gaze back in forth in an attempt to pick out any movement.
“I don’t see anything,” he said after several minutes passed. He repeatedly checked their position from all sides, revealing nothing, no gurghs following them. Just them and the landscape.
“Me either.” Eve paused the span of several heartbeats. “Let’s get out of here.” She had already started in the direction they had been heading. He fell into step beside her. He kept his head on a swivel.
“Noooo! Daddy!” The scream that shattered the air froze them both.
Eve looked at him, her eyes reflecting a thousand emotions. “Shit.” The sound of the child’s voice seemed to register to both of them in unison. “I’m going,” Eve said the words as if she expected him not to follow. He jerked his head back feeling as though she had slapped him.
Alive (The Crave) Page 10
